Realisations Of My Failures
by a mountain of gideon's scones
Summary: For the HPFC I'm about to die challenge. Sirius' last thoughts on this earth, remembering back to a time when he and his friends pledged something. R


_A fic for the HPFC challenge – I am about to die_

_I don't own anything_

_Sirius Black_

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Realisations come when you are about to die. You realise that you haven't managed to achieve anything that you thought you would.

When we were fifteen, James, Remus, Peter and I made ourselves some pacts that we would have reached certain things by certain stages in our lives.

James' first aim was to be dating Lily Evans by the time we left Hogwarts – something which he managed to achieve.

Remus' aim, before he reached thirty, was to have been employed for more than a week. He achieved that, reaching almost six months.

Peter's aim was to move out of his mother's house by the time he was nineteen, which he did by the skin of his teeth.

I didn't bother with wishes, or aims, to achieve by a certain stage in my life: I knew I would never achieve them. After all, you can't exactly put a time limit on finding love and the right girl, can you? I enjoyed having fun too much to take anything like that seriously, so I didn't plan out that I would have a wife by the age of twenty five or be a father by the time I reached my third decade on the Earth.

No, I was simple. I made aiming that Voldemort would be dead by the time that I died the only aim I had at the age of fifteen. Whilst the others also had dreams to reach before the impending moment where they end their time in this world and move into the world of the unknown, they too shared this aim that there would be no Voldemort by the time that they died…

But, for me, this was my only goal. All I wanted to be able to say was that I had managed to get rid of the world's most dangerous wizard of all time, hopefully meaning that the future generation wouldn't have to deal with him… dependant on when we managed this, I _wanted_ it to be before James and Lily had their inevitable child. I wanted it to be before Peter or I managed to settle down and Remus as well, if he had decided to give up on his 'no marriage incase the baby is a werewolf' idiocy he had going on.

But time elapsed as we left the OWL year and moved into NEWT. James managed to achieve his goal, of course, but by the time we left Hogwarts, we had absolutely no idea how we would manage to achieve our goal of destroying Voldemort. Us five – I had to include Lily in with us since her and James were inseparable – had been accepted to the Order of the Phoenix (or rather, we had been invited to join it) but yet we didn't know how to get to Voldemort.

Time passed and we got closer but then further away from our goal. Soon, James and Lily were married and had a baby, so I had failed at my mission to get Voldemort out of this world by then… but I found myself promising a second aim to myself: that I would do absolutely _everything_ in my power to protect this little boy.

I did my best.

I tried to get to him when my friends died, when they broke their promise to themselves that they would not die without Voldemort dying at the same time. After all, when he vanished that night, after killing them, there was absolutely _no_ way that he could have died. It was the same as saying that I, Sirius Black, was anything less of a womaniser after four years of pretty much spending my time with Lily being the only girl around… it just couldn't have happened. It was like saying that peter was the good one of the group when, in fact, he was the traitor who sold his best friends, the only parents in our entire year group, to Voldemort.

And I was proven right, once again. Merely last year, Voldemort returned from the 'dead' (I consider his break to actually be a little hiatus from _mass_ murdering anyone, but nothing further than that… he doesn't deserve the title of being 'the person to return from the dead') and began to terrorise us again.

He is the one who has meant that I died. Because of him, Harry _had_ to act rashly, but he did the right thing, the thing we Marauders would have done if we were in his position. If Voldemort wasn't around, I wouldn't have had to go to the Ministry as I did…

… I wouldn't have had to duel with my mad cousin (she is _totally_ from the other side of the family gene pool to me) if he wasn't around. I would never have said the fatal words of, "Surely you can do better than that?"

I would never have died.

Yet I cannot feel grief that I have died because, well, it meant that Harry didn't. it meant that someone from the brighter generation than us, the ones whose battle it then was, didn't have to feel Bellatrix's wrath as would have happened if she didn't kill me. After all, we had had our chance at destroying Voldemort. We were the failures… these kids didn't need us hanging around any longer and cramping their style.

When I died, I wasn't feeling sorrow for myself that I had died. I wasn't feeling sorrow that I hadn't managed to get a girl to marry me or that I had died childless, because those were never my aims.

No, I died feeling regret. I died knowing that I had not succeeded in my mission to destroy Voldemort before I died. I died knowing that I had left Harry Potter, my Godson but my son in a sense, alone in his fight to save us all from Voldemort, with even less family than he had before.

I died and knew that soon I would be greeted by James and Lily, those two most likely looking for news of their son. I knew that I could give them the knowledge that they had bore a son that was great, brilliant, amazing, strong and utterly like the two of them.

When I died, I didn't think of me. I didn't think of the fact that my death meant the world would no longer be such an amazing place, with _me_ in it (though it almost happened)… I didn't think of me.

I thought of Harry.

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_So, whatcha think?_

_Please review_

_Vicky xx_


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